1 : a rustling especially of a woman's skirts2 : showy or frilly ornamentationOrigin of FROUFROU

French, of imitative originFirst Known Use: 1870

(SRC: merriam-webster)

Saw a french poster "La Frou-Frou" with a cabaret girl, circa late 1800's, dancing on the cover. I think it is an advertising poster for a french magazine. It says "Demandez Partout / Le Frou-Frou / Le plus gros tirage des journaux humoristiques illustres".

I grew up with this word, always referring to girly big dresses or rooms that were to pink for a young boy.

Have heard it only in the second definition in a slightly disparaging sense. A guy comes in a room filled withfrilly decorations and/or gewgaws and comments something like, "What's all this froufrou doing here?

I generally associate this word with textiles (either raiment or upholstery), but it's also useful in gently talking a client down from an overly busy layout, or a highly ornamental typeface that irritates more than communicates.

And when talking about web pages, talk them out of using similar instead of contrasting colors for background and typeface, such as blue letters on black or navy. And, btw, "typeface" is an anomaly that looks like it will stay with us awhile until replaced by "font," also an anomoly. It also demonstrates the evolution of language, a subtext of a number of discussions lately.

I changed 'font' to 'typeface' before posting; although most people write/say the former, the term for what is actually seen on a screen or printed page is the latter. Since this is a language site, I went with the less familiar, more accurate 'typeface' over the more common but technically incorrect 'font'.

I spent much of the late 1960s as a pioneer in creating type graphics for digital processing. Strangely, I never noticed the difference between the words typeface and font.

It seems that a font is a typeface in a particular point size, while a typeface is a particular design style. Hence Times Roman is a typeface and 12 point Times Roman is a font. If that is the case, I suppose I was creating both. Fonts may be created by simply enlarging or decreasing the size of the letters. That was our first pass in creating digital type. But it is more complex than that.

When I was working in testing a new printer language, part of our lab took over a space used for creating truetype fonts. They would take a typeface and create a TrueType font by calculating every font point size and storing the results in a font file. Usual size range was 8 to 72 pt. They used very powerful Unix based machines.

I sometimes play at drawing out font like Time Roman on my drawing board, it is beautiful work. I'm sure it would get old if I had to do the whole alphabet in both upper and lower case. Plus all the numbers and supporting characters. I can see why typefaces are copywritten.